Hungry Ghosts Read online

  “Creatures who are always hungry, who can never get enough. We don’t shoo them away; we don’t hide from them. We call them. We feed them. We set up a table at the far end of the zendo, away from the altar.”

  He waited as if expecting me to ask why, but I didn’t ask.

  “We don’t feed them from the altar, from our teachings, from what we want to give them; we feed them what they can accept. We feed them, and then, Darcy, we let them go free. The ghosts are, of course, ourselves.”

  CHAPTER 4

  WHEN I PASSED through the great madrone doors at 4:30 P.M., the zendo was gone. In its place was a startlingly faux zendo, an illusion. A thick woolen rug simulated the wide plank flooring beneath it. Padded folding chairs in floor-length black slipcovers stood where the mats had been. In front of the wall we would be facing as we sat zazen stood a translucent veil that looked like it was made of crystal. Through it I could see the brick wall. With a step to one side, the wall was gone, replaced by mirrors. Another step and it was an opaque silver wall. Servers took positions behind a Brobdingnagian tetsubin. Most tetsubin—little iron Japanese teapots—served a single soul or two over a single thought. Tea was poured into delicate cups and sipped with attention. When the pot was empty, more hot water was poured over the leaves for a second, more subtle brew. Tetsubins connected teacher and student, friends discussing the dharma or dreams. The pots were luxuries made to enhance the delicacy of a private moment. This was something on a different scale.

  Whiffs of sandalwood floated by and were gone. From the far end of the room came the dissonant notes of a song for O-koto, a zither-like Japanese harp.

  My mind kept jumping from smell to no smell, expected melody to individual notes, from this carpeted faux zendo to this morning’s real one and back, as if trying to discern which was real and which the illusion.

  “What do you think?” Leo seemed to have materialized from the ether. He was wearing the same jacket and drawstring pants he’d had on this morning, but now with a white shirt that gave him a more formal air.

  “It’s brilliant! Life is illusion? A materialization of Zen? Or a dig at dilettantes expecting wine, cheese, and a soupçon of enlightenment—insight without discomfort? Take your pick. Plus, it’s gorgeous. The veil alone—reality, self, illusion. I love it! People will be talking about it for weeks. What about you?”

  “The artist really put herself into it. It’s a lovely gift,” he said, looking slowly around again. He was smiling but, I sensed, in the way of one given too great a gift, one with inherent demands.

  I wondered what those demands would turn out to be. “Eamon Lafferty,” I said, “must have paid a lot for this.”

  Before Leo could comment, the double doors opened and guests blew in like leaves at dusk. A fiftyish woman with shoulder-length monochromatic blonde hair, wearing a black silk suit—I pegged her as one of the lawyers—was followed by a college-aged woman of Asian descent arm in arm with a big brick of a guy who could have been a central casting thug. Leo stepped toward them and extended a hand. “It was very good of Eamon to invite you. There’s tea in the fine pot he’s provided and something to nibble on. Look around. Ask me anything you like. I am Leo Garson, the priest here, by the way . . .”

  I was impressed with Leo’s ability to make everyone welcome, giving credit even as he detached himself from any responsibility for the surroundings, yet at the same time indicating it was his place and he was in charge.

  Hands were extended, names given. Dark-suited attorneys with drawn faces mixed with tan-clad architects and languid gallery owners, along with more colorful dealers in antiques, designer furniture, and tribal carpets. I found myself following Leo’s example, listening as Jeffrey Hagstrom, who ran a shop down the street, explained why our building had survived the great earthquake and fire that destroyed much of the city in 1906: “Barbary Coast. Built on rock, so the earthquake didn’t do much, built with brick, so the fire wasn’t bad. That’s how come we’re standing here, how come this building’s still standing.” A short, square realtor who made a steady living on the turnover on this block alone predicted: “Be here at Christmas and you’ll be the old-timers. The thing . . . is . . .” She stared at the doorway.

  Behind us conversations faltered. With everyone else, I turned to the open doorway. I gasped.

  Mike.

  There he was! Alive, healthy, smiling.

  I couldn’t breathe; my heart banged against my ribs. I couldn’t move; I could barely keep myself from throwing my arms around him and hugging him for every one of the long-gone years, waiting for him to nudge me and do that flicker-of-an-eye thing I had called the cut-rate wink, to tell me everything—how sorry he was, how hard he’d tried to contact me. Memories, emotions, reactions broke over me like waves in a hurricane. Tears welled. Through them, I could see his hair was still as dark a red as mine, but that he was thicker than he’d been at twenty, wore a black jacket over jeans that was more San Francisco–conservative than he’d ever have imagined for himself. We’d go down to the dunes just like we did as kids and laugh about it later.

  My tears blurred him. He was slipping out of focus.

  I wiped my eyes, and the instant was gone. He wasn’t Mike at all, not even what Mike might have looked like, had he chosen a career in real estate or finance. I took a sip of tea and desperately wished my cup was filled with Dad’s Irish, the stuff Mike and I siphoned from the bottle “to keep us warm” during our major life discussions out in the dunes beyond the Great Highway.

  Behind me people were laughing. The reception had come to life again as if someone had hit Play. The man who had to be Eamon Lafferty moved out of the doorway toward Leo. His walk was not Mike’s lope of adventure, but the stroll of the laird. His red curls, tighter than mine, sneaked over his collar. He greeted Leo with a westernized bow, and drew Leo’s attention to the room as if asking his opinion. That need for reassurance made me like him better. The guests were talking again, but they hadn’t completely taken their eyes off Mike—off Eamon Lafferty—as if all of them were as transfixed as I.

  Even Leo was riveted.

  “Who is she?” asked the short realtor, whom I’d totally forgotten.

  Now I realized that the guests weren’t enthralled with Mike—with Eamon!—but by the woman he was introducing to Leo.

  Eamon Lafferty stepped back, opening a clear shot to the woman. All the fuzziness cleared; the picture shifted into its proper alignment. I laughed. The woman was about my height, 5′7″, my age, very thin, and altogether stunning. She was Tia Dru, and as long as I had known her—since we were fourteen—she’d had that startling effect on people. She was the only girl who’d ever left Mike speechless.

  “Tia!” I said, putting a hand on her arm.

  “Darcy? What are you doing here? I heard you’d left the city for good.”

  “I have a gig in the movie they’re doing here, up on Broadway.” I could have said, I’m the abbot’s assistant. I chose not to check Leo’s reaction.

  “You’re still doing stunt work? More power to you.” To the men, she said, “Darcy was already a S.A.G. card stunt double when I had a bit part in a film.”

  “In a couple of scenes that you utterly stole!” I laughed. “The star—I forget her name—was so pissed.”

  Tia grinned. “She was. It was like the dog stealing the show. Bet she never worked with a kid or dog again.” Tia hadn’t been a kid then, and both Leo and Eamon Lafferty seemed to understand that. The camera veering to Tia: it went without saying.

  “What kind of stunt were you doing?”

  I told them about the high fall. Be within the moment, Leo would have said. But I was paying scant attention to my explanation, more to the memory of Tia’s ability to deflect the spotlight while never losing any light. But mostly I found myself struggling not to stare at Eamon Lafferty’s dark brown eyes, his wider-than-Mike’s cheekbones, his laugh that was just a bit slower than the way Mike anticipated punch lines. Or maybe it was that Mike h
ad anticipated my punch lines.

  “While I was waiting for my Go call this morning, the spotlight crossed the roof here, and I saw you walking across it,” I said to him.

  “Really,” he replied, for the first time focusing entirely on me. He hesitated before adding, “And you could still go on with your stunt? I thought stuntmen did a sort of mental dry run right before they started, like athletes.”

  “They are athletes, you clod.” Tia poked Eamon’s arm and laughed in that way that included everyone in our little group. I felt sure that Eamon had been on the verge of asking something: why I was looking at his roof, or what I’d seen. But, as she’d always done, Tia transformed the situation, and the moment when he might have said more than he’d intended had passed.

  Instead, he shifted back to smiling at Tia, as if I didn’t exist. I was still half trying to regain the moment when he was Mike, when I was hugging him, when—

  Leo raised his voice. “So you met on a movie set?”

  “Met again. Darcy and I were in high school together. We were the two special admissions girls in our class, and we steered clear of each other.”

  I tried to focus, to take in what she was saying, and heard myself slipping into Tia-speak: “But as a kid on an athletic entry into a very serious academic school, I had so little free time I conjugated Latin in the bathroom stall. I still can’t hear ‘amo, amas, amat’ without having the urge to pee.” The rest of the reception guests were talking in groups, but they might as well have been silent, watching Tia; they couldn’t keep their eyes off her.

  She shifted away from me and I gasped, caught myself, bobbled my teacup, and turned away to cover it all. Tia was holding a cane. I couldn’t believe it! It wasn’t right! Not Tia Dru! Why would she need a cane? She was magic, meant to soar. How could she be reliant on a piece of metal?

  I made a production of getting a napkin for the tea on my hand. Maybe it was because I’d already been knocked off-center by Eamon, but I felt even more out of focus now. Tia Dru, what was going on?

  Maybe, I told myself, the cane’s only temporary. But it wasn’t the kind of cane you get and toss away in a week. I focused on Eamon, then on Leo, all the while trying to see past them to Tia, trying not to stare. She gave the appearance of not leaning on the cane, or on anything else. She was thin in a way that was close to malnutrition, and yet there was always an allure in that near-need for nurture paired with her casual sensuality. Her hair, pale brown, parted in the center, was cut to cup her face. Her khaki shawl draped over a scoop-necked black silk T-shirt, a black skirt, and a little butter-brown leather shoulder purse. That attire should have described a staid, safe woman; instead it looked like clothes she couldn’t wait to tear off, to dive off the high board, to race to the beach, to slowly beckon a lover. She’d always had the aura of a woman who’d dare death without a second thought, who’d risk all and never look back.

  Her fearlessness, the sense of freedom she projected, had been too much for the rest of us. Incomprehensible, really. She asked for nothing, making anyone else who did want something—maybe a lot of it—sure that she was hiding, suppressing, avoiding, escaping a need so gaping that it would swallow her unless we could save her.

  It was Mike who summed it up one night when I was supposed to be doing statistics homework and he was standing by the door to my room. “You know the Chinese saying: if you save a man from drowning, you’re responsible for him for the rest of his life?”

  I’d nodded, forty-five percent of a sample of six thousand questionnaire respondents swept out of my mind.

  “You think it’s a warning to avoid barnacles, right?”

  It had taken me a moment to see the rescued man as a human barnacle attached to the bottom of his benefactor. But I had learned long ago to give my nod well before actual understanding, lest he think of me as a mere kid.

  “Untrue. The Chinese were no fools; they knew how seductive it is being the savior. You know how good you feel when you’re the one who can set everything right, how hot shit you feel, above it?” He had grinned then. We were both laughing. “Who’s saved and who’s hooked?” Even then I was startled by his acuity, he to whom his shrewdness so clearly applied.

  It wasn’t Mike’s only observation about Tia. Looking at her now, I realized that he’d talked about her a lot for a girl four years younger, at a time when four years is as good as decades.

  But she hadn’t seemed sixteen back then, and she didn’t seem near forty now. She was tied down to no age, limited to no group. And when saving was foisted upon her, she was always grateful. And she never, ever asked for more. She was the perfect savee, but she never took her salvation for granted.

  Once, I knew, she’d had a run-in with the IRS. I never knew what it was all about exactly, just that afterwards one of my brothers walked into the office of a tax attorney friend and was awed by a shimmering glass room divider that Tia had made in thanks.

  Art installation! Of course! Tonight’s faux zendo was Tia’s work! Now things fell into place: why she’d arrived with Eamon Lafferty. Why he’d spent way more money than was necessary and was still smiling. Why there was an ephemeral quality to the work. Why Leo was already talking with her like she was an old friend. And why I felt the same stab of jealousy that had pierced me as a teenager when Tia had charmed everyone, including me.

  As if to demonstrate, Tia now smiled at Jeffrey, the guy who’d told me about our building surviving the 1906 earthquake. And, with that surprised smile of a chosen one, he hurried over.

  “I’m sure you all know Jeffrey Hagstrom, but I’ll do the propers anyway,” she said. “Jeffrey is the histo-architectural expert on the Barbary Coast.”

  He must have been in his early thirties but still had a baby face. He flushed as she spoke. It was hard to imagine him as known, much less well-known.

  “He’s the consultant to the producers of Barbary Nights.”

  A rouge of embarrassment bloomed on Hagstrom’s round, pallid face. “I answer their questions. What they do with my answers—”

  “Barbary is like all companies.” The voice was tenor, the accent was British, the speaker was the central casting goon who’d come in with the college student. Was he part of the movie company? I hadn’t seen him this morning, but it wasn’t as if I had been eyeing the entire crew at 5:30 A.M. “Our aim is to entertain, not to footnote.”

  Jeffrey stumbled back, all bloom gone.

  “Our real Barbary Coast never loses its intrigue, does it?” Tia said, barely missing a beat, as if that had been the thug’s point all along. “No district in all of San Francisco has changed as dramatically as this respectable street. But suppose”—Tia looked directly at the deflated Hagstrom, drawing her hands apart as if she were opening the possibilities—“suppose we were right here a hundred fifty years ago, what would we see?”

  “A lot more of you than we do now.”

  To a one we stared at Hagstrom, as if to say: did that double entendre come from your little pink mouth? Then we laughed, some of us more than others, the thug not at all.

  Tia smiled, perfectly comfortable with her barnacle. “So Darcy and I are ladies of the night?”

  “It’s the nineteenth century; there aren’t any other kinds of women here,” Jeffrey said, his color returning.

  “And you gentlemen?”

  “Eamon, you’re just off a freighter back from the Far East. You’re still lurching from two years at sea and all that gold banging around in your pockets. You can’t wait to spend that money—”

  “On us?” Tia asked with a wink at Eamon.

  “You and drink, not necessarily in that order,” Jeffrey answered for him.

  “And the abbot?” She gave a smile to Leo and let it linger a moment. She seemed the Tia of old, delectably at ease in her utter control. But I couldn’t help notice her hand tighten on her cane.

  Jeffrey accepted a cup of tea from a passing waiter. “Abbot, of course you’d be a preacher. There are a few missions at the edges of
the Barbary Coast, though it’s such a lost cause you’ll be focusing on the heathens in Chinatown.”

  “Converting them?”

  “Ultimately. But, more practically, setting up safe houses. Life is much, much better for the white prostitutes here than the Chinese in Chinatown. No, really—” he held up a hand to forestall my comment. “If you’re Chinese, you were kidnapped or sold by your family, shipped to a strange country, plunked into a crib on the street, and screwed until you’re too diseased to be worth anything. When that point comes”—he paused for effect, and a sip of tea—“your pimp carries you to a room with no window, maybe an underground storage space. He lays you on a slab, places a pot of tea and an oil lamp next to you, and walks out. You hear the door lock. The only light is the dimming glow from the lamp. You just hope you die before the oil burns away.”

  I shivered and clutched my teacup tighter, trying not to feel the agony of a woman abandoned and waiting for death in total blackness. It was a moment before I realized that Jeffrey had stopped talking, that a horrified silence had descended on our group. Tia’s hand jerked and for the first time she actually leaned on her cane. She was looking at Jeffrey, not with horror, or even distress as he stood in the damning silence, but with the kind of panic I had seen only on the faces of other women. After what seemed ages, she walked, now relying on that cane she had been careful to appear not to need at all. She went to Jeffrey’s side and put her arm through his.

  Her sweet gesture resuscitated the group. Eamon signaled the waiter to bring tea. “And you, Jeffrey?” I asked, taking pity on him, “what’s your job?”

  “Me? Well, I’m a small man, of the sort that needs money to protect them. I, uh, I own this building, this saloon. This room here—back then it actually was a saloon. So I own the saloon and you ladies are hustling drinks here and guiding our guest upstairs, since the entire focus of the Barbary Coast is to separate a sailor from his booty.”

  “Surely a sailor—Eamon—couldn’t spend it all in one night, even on one of us.” Tia’s laugh sounded only a bit forced. She freed Jeffrey’s arm and let her hand rest in his pocket, as if to assure him she was still there.